


Get Me Through the Night (Til We're Twins Again)

by Anonymous



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angsty Schmoop, Canon-Typical Violence, Dragon Heist, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, M/M, Schmoop, Spoilers, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25072714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Floon has been rescued after being mistaken for Renaer, kidnapped, and almost killed. Now Renaer wants to convince him to get in a new kind of trouble.
Relationships: Renaer Neverember/Floon Blagmaar
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5
Collections: Anonymous





	Get Me Through the Night (Til We're Twins Again)

Renaer watched as Volo attempted to overwhelm the party of filthy, unimpressed adventurers with an avalanche of conversation, smiling despite himself. Beside him, Floon stood stiffly, his fingers prodding at his bruised, swollen face.

“Volo! Make sure our friends are taken care of! We owe them our thanks and more,” Renaer called.

Volo nodded, summoning a member of the household to prepare baths and bedrooms.

Renaer started to throw his arm around Floon’s shoulders to drag him close, as he had uncounted times before. Floon flinched, so Renaer shoved his hands in his pockets where they could do no further harm.

“Floon – “Renaer paused. “Let’s get cleaned up.”

Floon shrugged, and Renaer led the way upstairs, hoping that Floon would follow, not daring to look back to see for sure.

In his room, Renaer bullied Floon into taking the first bath, showing him the towels and soap as if he were a stranger who didn’t know as well as Renaer where to find them. Floon had slept in that bathtub more than once, when Renaer was so drunk Floon insisted on supervising him, to make sure he didn’t drown on his own sick in the night.

They never closed the door to the bathing chamber, preferring to joke and shout at one another while one of them bathed and the other dressed, but Floon pulled the door shut with a click of finality.

Renaer leaned against the wall and let himself slowly collapse to the floor. He was too disgusting to touch his furniture, and he was closer to Floon here, anyway. Renaer replayed the scene in the sewer over in his memory. Floon’s bright hair had been matted with dark blood, tacky and room temperature when Renaer had run his hands over Floon’s head, searching for wounds already closed. Then he’d lost his senses entirely, and kissed Floon in front of a crowd of strangers, and Floon hadn’t kissed him back. Maybe it was down to shock, or anger that Renaer had gotten him into yet another mess.  _ Or maybe, _ he thought,  _ he doesn’t feel about me the way I do about him. _

Renaer had assumed they were flirting and fighting their way through the taverns of Waterdeep in some kind of extended courtship, occasionally parting and ending the night with an appealing stranger, but more often stumbling home together. Surely they’d just been getting the youth and stupidity worked out of their systems before they admitted what they both knew. He’d thought they were inevitable. Perhaps he was a fool. He’d thought Floon was going to be killed because of him, and he’d gone a little mad.

The door opened and Floon emerged, clean, with a towel wrapped around his waist. His chest was a terrifying kaleidoscope of bruises. It hurt to see them. Renaer turned his head like a coward.

“Get whatever you want to wear out of the wardrobe. I’m going to wash. Don’t leave.” Renaer was pathetic, but he would beg if he needed to.

“I’ll wait,” Floon said.

Renaer bathed as quickly as he could, although it took two scrubbings to completely remove the smell of the sewer. Floon never lied to him, but he was in no mood to test his patience.

Self-conscious, Renaer donned a towel. It probably wasn’t the done thing to parade naked in front of your best friend/love-of-your-life when you’d recently assailed his lips with yours. Floon was sitting on Renaer’s bed, dressed in Renaer’s clothes, staring at the ceiling. Renaer grabbed the first shirt and trousers he saw and put them on.

“I think I owe you a new pair of boots,” Renaer said from the inside of the wardrobe. “Ours are ruined utterly.”

Floon made an uncertain noise, and Renaer slammed the wardrobe doors.

“Obviously I owe you my life, as well as a blasted pair of shoes. Can you forgive me? For – anything, everything.”

“You’re an idiot.” Floon spoke softly. “As if there’s any such thing as debt between us. As if there could be, after the thing with the – “

Renaer laughed incredulously. “Of course, the thing with the firbolg. I would remind you that we were twelve!”

“You were an idiot when you were twelve,” Floon said. “You haven’t changed.”

“A few things may have changed.” Renaer crossed the room, trying to see Floon’s expression in the lanternlight. He sat on the bed at Floon’s feet.

Floon was already shaking his head. “No. You love everyone Renaer, it’s your way. And you were worried. You felt guilty because of what happened. But it will pass.”

“If it hasn’t passed since we were twelve, I doubt it’s going to be gone in the morning.”

“You chase every pretty person who looks at you through their eyelashes, Renaer.”

Renaer’s jaw dropped. “We chase every pretty person who looks at us, you mean.”

“I buy them drinks until you leave and then I go home. Unless I’m so miserable with jealousy over you that I can’t help myself, but that kind of tumble only makes it worse.” Floon’s face was flushed underneath his bruises with embarrassment, or anger, or both.

“I didn’t know,” Renaer said.

“Because you’re an idiot.”

“Yes, I’m an idiot!” Renaer threw his hands in the air. “I thought we were sowing our wild oats before we settled down. I had no idea you weren’t thinking the same thing.”

“How would I – Renaer, I wouldn’t share a book of mine with anyone but you. I worked too hard to get what I have. How could you think I’d share you?”

Renaer was flummoxed, but warmth was expanding inside him. He felt himself start to grin.

Floon looked at him steadily. “Renaer, think it through. You have responsibilities, and you’re going to have more. Your father is going to extricate himself from his current difficulties the way he always does.”

Renaer grimaced but Floon continued.

“You’ll be an open lord someday.” Floon leaned forward intently. “You know if we’re together, there’s no little Neverembers in your future. No one to hand it all down to. Unless you decide to do the proper thing, get married to some beautiful society girl who will run your house and bear your children, and resent us both for carrying on behind her back. Then she’ll have me poisoned one day and smile at you across the table that night.”

“I’m beginning to like this wife you conjured up for me,” Renaer laughed. “She’s far more interesting than any society girl I’ve met so far.”

“Now you’re joking,” Floon sighed. “But you’re a loyal person with a loyal heart, so it will eat you up in the end. I don’t want to be the cause of it. Please, don’t ask me because I can’t say no.”

“You are usually, as much as it pains me to say, right,” Renaer said. “But not this time. Waterdeep is always on the verge of chaos, even when my father hasn’t turned the entire city against us. There are warring factions and now the mystery of this cache of dragons, which could have gotten us both killed tonight.”

Renaer took a deep breath. “If I live to see thirty it will be because the gods delight in comedy.”

“Don’t say that.” Floon grabbed Renaer’s hand.

“It’s true.” Renaer clasped Floon’s fingers, and Floon startled, as if he had no idea how they’d ended up so close to one another. “There are a hundred ways for me, or the gods forbid it, you, to meet a messy death long before some hypothetical wife does us in.”

“But that doesn’t matter.” Renaer leaned over Floon’s hand and breathed onto his scraped knuckles. “If we manage to live, I’m going to find a way for us to have everything we want. And I’m not wasting any more time.”

“You’re crazy,” Floon said, his voice shaking.

“Probably,” Renaer replied. “But I think it’s working for me. Is it?”

“Probably.”

Renaer lifted his head, wondering what it might be like if he kissed his best friend, and his best friend kissed him back. Floon met him halfway.

***

“It’s ridiculous that we look the way we do,” Floon said, pulling away from Renaer a little and tugging at a lock of his hair, almost exactly the same color as Floon’s own. “You’re a raging narcissist and I feel like a teenager practicing kissing with his reflection in the mirror.”

Renaer drew him carefully back in.

“If it bothers you so much, close your eyes.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was written mid-campaign, as a cutaway scene, based solely on information provided in game. In the interests of not finding out anything I shouldn't know, I have done no research whatsoever. I can only hope any discrepancies in ages, professions, motivations, etc. will be resoundingly ignored by a forgiving reader. Tagged for spoilers out of an abundance of caution. Title is taken from Twin Skeleton's by Fall Out Boy.


End file.
